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SSFC to streamline budget process

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by Carolyn Potts

Friday, January 25, 2008

The Student Services Finance Committee determined its spring 2008 budget timeline Thursday in its first meeting of the semester.

SSFC met in the Beefeater room of Memorial Union to discuss the committee’s upcoming events. The committee has divided its duties of the semester into two parts. In the first part of the semester, the committee plans to have a series of discussions to better understand the complicated budgets of non-allocable funds.

“These budgets … account for roughly 79 percent of segregated fees,” SSFC member Adam Porton said. “We are going to hear a presentation on how to read them and then we will hear these [budgets] over about a month’s time.”

The committee plans to address the budgets of different organizations on campus including the Wisconsin Union, recreational sports and University Health Services.

“We will also go through some of the other parts of [Associated Students of Madison] such as the bus passes, student activity centers, and ASM is trying to push forward a rape crisis contract with a community agency, either the hospital or the rape crisis center,” SSFC Chair Alex Gallagher said.

After coming across litigation for their bylaws being vague, SSFC plans to spend the second half of the semester working on revising them. Gallagher admits, “they aren’t fantastically written bylaws.”

“We are consistently trying to make them more transparent, and now that we have the time to be able to do it, we’re going to go back through and look at where the problems are,” Gallagher said.

At the meeting, the group also established two different subcommittees that will divide up the more detailed work on budgets this semester. Porton will be chairing a subcommittee focused primarily on General Student Services Fund organizations.

“It is policies [ranging] from what money can be spent on, how they have to apply, what the forms will look like and what the timeline is going to look like,” Porton said. “We’re really just seeing if anything needs to be changed and improved upon.”

According to Porton, the second committee will be chaired by SSFC Secretary Kurt Gosselin, and will be dealing with “a new revenue strain designed for organizations that are not registered student organizations and therefore are not eligible for normal funding from our committee, but that we still feel are valuable to the community and deserve [segregated] fees because they serve students.”

The committee spent most of the fall semester working with GSSF regulations to determine whether certain organizations were eligible for specific funds. Their plans for this semester will be much less hectic, Gallagher said.

The group is currently working on the budget for the 2008-09 school year, which they will present to the chancellor as a package.

“I think that one thing students are concerned about is the level that they are paying in segregated fees and how that impacts the activities on campus,” Gallagher said. “We are trying to strike a balance between providing services, activities and things that students get involved in while still representing something that’s financially stable.”

Since they have been working to regulate where fees are allocated segregated fees should decrease next year, according to Gallagher.

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